The longstanding history of Gurkha service with the British military has brought about not only Nepalese diasporic families that settle in different parts of the world over time, but also hold implications for the next generation, the Nepalese youths. I assess how the backdrop of Gurkha recruitment to the British Crown and family lives in the diaspora interconnect with the pursuit of higher-education/career-building by children of the Gurkhas. Having Gurkha relations has made it possible for them to move forward with some forms of upward mobility in pursuing higher education outside of Nepal. This direction is undertaken in addition to other Nepali students who are not linked to the Gurkha legacy in the UK and elsewhere. Potentially, this study may be broadened to include Nepali students studying for their degrees in Australia as well, in order map out and compare varying diasporic and aspirational pathways for Nepali overseas students.These youths and professionals who are studying or working the UK undergo various challenges and varied experiences as they navigate what it means to grow up elsewhere, and to negotiate their schooling and working years overseas as they maintain ties and connections with Nepal. How do they construct their senses of identity, belonging and notions of what home means as they build their lives in the UK? What does it mean to be a British-Nepalese or Nepalese-British in today's context vis-a-vis broader migratory vicissitudes?
I interrogate how urban atmospheres comprising smoke and air through varying forms of religious practice, air pollution and industrial productions, cigarette/tobacco smoking and other domains avail a wide-ranging scope of sensory analytical possibilities. The largely global drive toward eco-transformation and priorities in response to climate change and other interpellating factors are broader structural scales to bear in mind as I explore how smoke and air as sensory matter transpire across different scales of experience and urban governance. This project, for which I have recently begun archival work, extends out from the latest book on Sensory Contact Zones in the City where I have explored urban experiences and sensory encounters vis-à-vis human-animal relations. Departing from a country case study of Singapore, I extrapolate analytical ideas and relate to broader regional and global dynamics of how urban atmospheres and their politicisation draw upon debates pertaining to anthropogenic environmental change and challenges.
Human-animal presences in city life is neither a novel nor recent phenomenon. I take different facets of the urban as contact zones between humans and animals and reflect on how such multispecies co-presences and encounters and their concomitant sensory relations shore up boundaries and parameters of spatial use and sensory governance. What sources or avenues of urban sensory governance are there, and how are they invoked, contested, and altered over time in relation to heightened presences of nonhuman actors in urbanity? Through what methodologies can we ascertain and conceptualise urban density and sensory contexts vis-à-vis decibel measurements, spatial limits, and sensorial proximity? The research provides a historical and contemporary purview of human-animal relations in the city as sensory phenomena. By doing so, a range of methodological approaches and data generation on human-animal encounters and urban dwelling will elucidate upon how such co-presences require further reflections and urban planning and governance to manage multispecies city life and urban sensescapes.
This paper consolidates anthropomorphic and transgressive consequences of smells and sounds in Asian colonial urbanities. By analysing archival media reports across different Asian cities in the 1800s and 1900s, I explore the interconnected relations between urban sanitation, space and time vis-a-vis sensory excess. Apart from invading urban residential peace and order, sensory excess and its permeating mobility also pose a threat to and transgression of adequate public health and hygiene. Senses such as smell and sound constitute public nuisance (Howes & Classen 2014). These transgressions precipitate public discourse and municipal action about sanitary ways of conduct. In addition to the maintenance of proper sanitary methods of dealing with waste and other forms of effluvia, these responses are connected to the (desires for) social and legal bracketing of space and time. I make two key observations herein: (1) Regardless of whether sense modalities like sound and smell remain formless, immaterial, fluid, and are expansive in their mobility and permeability, social actors continue to come up with ways to manage these modalities and to contain them. These are accomplished by proposing to legally compartmentalize time and space to limit if not eliminate sensory intrusions. (2) Sensory restraint in the form of discourse and legal intervention serves to protect the interests of particular social groups. Such preferential positioning of one group’s sonic behavior over the other subsequently lays grounds for the justification for introducing legal intervention. Therefore, I critique legal metrics and inadequacies or slippages of sensory governance. Subsequently, these avenues of distinction generate a rethinking of implications that come to bear upon urban living, spatiality, and temporality.